Margot Livesey returns with a gem of a novel

In 2001, Margot Livesey published a novel based on the life of her mother, who died young and who, it was said, had the gift of second sight. That book, the poignant Eva Moves the Furniture, told the story of a girl whose life was guided by two ghostly companions, seamlessly blending mortal life with the afterworld.

Now, after several other successful novels (The Boy in the Field, The Flight of Gemma Hardy), Livesey has returned to her mother's life for inspiration. The Road from Belhaven, set in Victorian Scotland, tells of orphaned Lizzie, who lives with her grandparents, Rab and Flora, on a small farm outside Glasgow. Like Eva, Lizzie is haunted — by “pictures,” shimmering images that come to her unbidden, revealing the future.

Livesey, who was born in Scotland and teaches at the

Iowa Writers' Workshop, often explores the loss of innocence. The Road from Belhaven is a coming-of-age story about abandonment, betrayal and inheritance. The prose is radiant and descriptive, rich with Scottish imagery — dreich (gloomy) days, the tradition of first-footing (being the first to enter a house in the new year, for luck), jackdaws and curlews, bluebells and blackthorn. There are so many mentions of eggs, universal shorthand for fertility, that you just know there's going to be a baby at some point in this story.

Even as a child, Lizzie knows to keep her gift a secret. “We all want to know the future, but only God can know what's coming,” her grandmother tells her. “It's the devil tempting us when we try to find out.” From the devil or not, these glimpses into the future complicate Lizzie's life greatly.

At first, most of the pictures are of unremarkable things: “Her grandmother choosing which hen to kill, a cow stuck in the mud by the river.” But as she grows older, the pictures foretell calamity: Flora's death, a lover's betrayal, a house engulfed in flames. Are these events inevitable? Can she stop them from happening? She can certainly try. And so Lizzie moves through life trying to outwit her own future.

Belhaven is a place where legend and mysticism are stitched into everyday life. A rowan tree keeps witches away; a group of ancient pagan standing stones is so unremarkable that Lizzie and her sister sit on one of the fallen stones to chat.

Lizzie is a sympathetic character, strong, capable and restless. She wants more than her sister's life of babies and housework. When Rab hires a local boy to help on the farm, her life begins to change. Farming is not his future, Hugh tells her; frustrated by Rab's stubbornly old-fashioned ways, he eventually heads to Glasgow to study engineering. When he returns for the harvest the next autumn, he brings his handsome friend Louis, and Lizzie's world changes again, in far more dramatic ways.

When Lizzie is driven to make a series of rash decisions with dire consequences, the question that haunts Livesey's novel is thrown into sharp relief: Are we in control of our own destinies?

While the answer for Lizzie and perhaps most young women of her age and time is a dark one, Livesey's piercing and eloquent novel manages to convey the wonderful mysteries that life offers along the way.